Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

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The US is not founded on 'someone else's land'. Small portions of the US perhaps, yes, and treaties and courts work through that. Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.

Seasonal camping sites make sense, more from a 'our land' perspective.

And naturally any signed treaties should be honoured.

You may say "But, they were here first!", yet that's quite false. Native Americans invaded as well, either subsuming or slaughtering existing populations as they did so. Further, Native Americans warred, fought, killed each other, just as Europeans, Middle Easterners, and everyone else on the planet did. After all, human is human is human, and that's (sadly) what humans do.

And if you look at every other country on the planet, the precise same is true. Locals pushed aside as newcomers invaded, whether the UK, Scotland, Russia, Germany, the Middle East, literally every place on the planet.

There is no peoples, no country, no ethic group, which has not over time invaded another.

There is no one alive today, that does not stand on land once called 'home' by another.

You may wonder why I say this, but instead of discussing a land plot inside a Western country taken over by another citizen, you immediately dove into Native American rights and a Middle Eastern conflict for some inexplicable reason.

Under contract law, should the treaties be honored if the other party weren’t capable of full understanding of what they were signing? I agree with you, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

This is a complex and nuanced point, but there is complexity and such nuance elsewhere, too. For example, I often see "trillions of dollars of $city land are in dispute!" then citing that a settlement of immense magnitude should result.

Of course, the land in question was effectively open forest/plains, isolated with no cities and almost no one living on or around it. And if it remained as so, by todays standards, would be worth often dollars per acre. Meanwhile, we're attributing dollar amounts to land which only became valuable, because it was developed by some means.

While I am not directly answering your question, I frankly find the 'cut off' period to be quite weird. Everyone on the planet has ancestors which have been displaced, AND have displaced peoples. We're both the conquerors and the conquered. For example, I have Scottish heritage. Where's the payment for the land the English stole from my ancestors? And for the English, where's the payment that the Romans owe, for the land taken from those in the isles 2k years ago? Or the French owe, when they invaded and hung out for a while?

Individuals were displaced, entire groupings of people slaughter or literally decimated.

It goes on and on and on, back through time, all owing all. Yet that is completely ignored, including endless land grabs all over the planet even over the last 2 centuries, but... oh well, significant compensation and land returns are only really given to those in North America.

I believe in fairness. And to me, this seems... off somehow.

It's because the moral standing for these measures is primitive tribalism, and neither principled nor disinterested.

Well I think you just proved my point on why land ownership is not a simple analogy :)

> Most Indians were hunter/gatherers, and suggesting that because someone roves through massive tracts of land is ownership, is beyond weird.

It is not "beyond weird." It is a well-defended position in contemporary political theory and it has had many prominent defenders for hundreds of years. For example, in the 1790s, Immanuel Kant wrote:

It can still be asked whether, when neither nature nor chance but just our own will brings us into the neighborhood of a people that holds out no prospect of a civil union with it, we should not be authorized to found colonies, by force if need be, in order to establish a civil union with them and bring these human beings (savages) into a rightful condition (as with the American Indians, the Hottentots and the inhabitants of New Holland); or (which is not much better), to found colonies by fraudulent purchase of their land, and so become owners of their land, making use of our superiority without regard for their first possession. Should we not be authorized to do this, especially since nature itself (which abhors a vacuum) seems to demand it, and great expanses of land in other parts of the world, which are now splendidly populated, would have otherwise remained uninhabited by civilized people or, indeed, would have to remain forever uninhabited, so that the end of creation would have been frustrated? But it is easy to see through this veil of injustice (Jesuitism), which would sanction any means to good ends. Such a way of acquiring land is therefore to be repudiated.

I see no relevance in your quoted text, with respect to what I said in my post. And the premise I cited is indeed beyond weird.

Note that I said seasonal camping sites make sense. And I said treaties make sense. I simply said 'wandering about' doesn't convey ownership, aka 'possession'. To take such a notion to the extreme, imagine a grouping of 4 who rove all around the entirety of Canada and the US through their lifetime. You could easily do this over 20 to 30 years. Should those 4 be attributed possession? As owners of that entire landmass via treaty, or just prevent any use of that land by anyone else?

Absurd. And it is equally absurd that land used for travel between two campsites, basically as a road, should mysteriously convey ownership/possession too.

For example, typically there were winter and summer camp sites in the US. Yet when not doing so, Natives would often 'rove' from one of the other, think 'migration'. Yet I've seen ridiculous assertions that someone basically using the land as a road between two campsites, to conveys ownership. Sheer nonsense.

Your argument in the post up-thread appears to be that because the Native Americans did not cultivate or make use of the land in any Western sense, they have no claim to ownership. The Kant quote attempts to repudiate this by stating that it makes no difference whether we consider the Native Americans' use of the land to be ineffective: their deprivation of it is still an injustice and, when it comes to injustice, the ends cannot justify the means.

I don't find Kant's position at all convincing, mostly because the two parties' understandings of the concept of "ownership" were not mutually intelligible (possession vs usufruction). However, the quote does have relevance to your post.

The key here is 'use'. Kant, while obviously not some gospel to be held to any form of authority, is making a point about differences in culture and sure, as you said, use. However, my point wasn't disputing usage at all. Living on it. Hunting on it. Working the land.

However no view exists in a vacuum, and I will indelibly view my example of a group of 4 as a valid statement, about the absurdities of 'walked on the land once in my life, to get to my summer/winter home', compared to some claims of a tribe of a few hundred people, somehow owning hundreds of millions of acres of land, just cause they walked on tiny parts of it to get to their seasonal homes.

So no, I don't see the relevance, because I'm not discussing the concepts therein directly.

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